Currently most garment spring clips of the type used to support straps on overalls, commonly referred to as button loops or overall clips, consist of a wire loop form having a pair of arms which are shaped to provide a button receiving portion for engaging the stem of a button on a bib of a garment. The pair of arms are spring biased towards a closed position and are usually retained in alignment by a stamped piece of sheet metal, sometimes referred to as the encasement. The sheet metal also prevents the arms from being opened to such an extent as to deform the arms and remove their spring action. Examples of such devices are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 1,346,911 to C. E. Peterson; U.S. Pat. No. 1,775,101 to R. J. Hodge; U.S. Pat. No. 1,798,146 to J. H. Domkee; U.S. Pat. No. 1,824,547 to R. J. Hodge; U.S. Pat. No. 1,831,804 to J. H. Domkee; U.S. Pat. No. 1,832,191 to J. H. Domkee; U.S. Pat. No. 1,844,282 to R. J. Hodge; U.S. Pat. No. 1,844,283 to R. J. Hedge; U.S. Pat. No. 2,146,496 to C. E. Anderson; U.S. Pat. No. 4,935,997 to N. A. Hirsch; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,005,269 to N. A. Hirsch. The basic design for these two piece clips has changed little over the last seventy years.
The above two piece spring clips provided an improvement over prior one piece retention clips. The prior art one piece clips were wire forms or stamped metal which did not have any spring action. Rather, they simply slide over a button stem and retained a garment in place with simple gravitational forces. Thus, there was no spring tension to hold a clip onto the stem of a button. In certain applications, such as on children's clothing and during transportation of garments such as overalls, these prior art one piece clips were prone to falling off. The two piece clips which provide spring action to engage buttons had significant advantages over the prior art one piece clips and have been used extensively over the last seventy-five years.
Although two piece spring clip have been used extensively, the sheet metal encasement or retainers of the two piece button clips may be subject to unwanted deformation and breaking as a result of repeated washing in washing machines. When a garment using such a clip is washed the two piece clip may become entangled with other garment or pieces of the machine washer which pull on the wire loop or the encasement and cause the encasement to become loose or otherwise fall off. Although some manufacturers claim that certain configurations of encasements may provide improved performance over other designs in this respect, the problem persists and is inherent to any two piece loop known in the prior art.
As a result, one piece clips are still in use today. Examples of such devices are shown in U.S. Design Pat. No. 306,272 to J. B. Kruger and U.S. Pat. No. 56,042 to De Ver H. Warner, and U.S. Pat. No. 1,695,056 to C. A. Mosgrove; U.S. Pat. No. 3,911,537 to H. E. Mazur. In some case button loops have been formed from a single piece of sheet metal or plastic material, see, e.g., U.S. Design Pat. No. 358,567 to W. A. Sirois and U.S. Pat. No. 4,204,300 to G. Fildan.
As with the original one piece retention clips, prior art clips which are formed from a single piece of material or which are otherwise retained together through either a weld or support element tend to be too rigid and do not provide enough lateral movement to engage and disengage a metal button with ordinary spring force. In addition, pieces which are welded together tend to be problematic because they are subject to breakage after extensive use and washing.
To the extent that single wire button loops are formed to provide the necessary shape without welding or a support element to retain the wire ends together, i.e., the ends of the wire are simply put in an abutting relationship, the clip becomes subject to deformation upon repeated use and washing.
One prior art spring clip developed by Mississippi Trading, Inc., the assignee of the present invention, which is shown in FIG. 1, solved many of the problems with the prior art clips discussed above. These clips were made from one single piece of wire form, were sturdy, prevented children from being injured on sharp metal pieces and proved to be easy to use with adequate spring action. These clips however, use interlocking lateral elements which require that the metal be bent. The bent portions of the top arm may be too bulky for some fine cloth material which may be used in infants' and children's clothing.